Spotify – the next generation

This morning we’re really excited to announce a major evolution of Spotify. Today we begin rolling out Spotify version 0.4.3 which includes the largest feature upgrade since our launch in late 2008.

To kick it off we’ve added a number of social features, centered on a fully editable Spotify music profile, with the ability to publish playlists, top artists and top tracks for public view. Discovering these profiles is simple as we’ve connected with Facebook so that you can instantly add your friends’ profiles.

As well as introducing a variety of new social features, Spotify is evolving into a total music management platform. We’ve added a ‘Library’ folder in the left side bar, enabling you to combine your own music library with ours.

But before we get into all the details, we’ve put together a little video which will walk you through some of the new features.

That’s a taste of some of the new features we’ve added but there’s a fair bit more, in fact we’ve added over a dozen new features and improvements to this release. The full list of new features, which will be made available to both free and premium users, includes:

Social

Connect to Facebook: you can connect to Facebook inside of Spotify, instantly adding all your Facebook friends who’ve selected the same feature. Your friends’ profiles will appear in a new ‘People’ sidebar at the right of the screen, with your personal profile at the top.

Add usernames: you can also add people by typing their Spotify username, should you know it, into the Spotify search field. For example searching ‘spotify:user:username’ will bring up their profile (if their profile is published).

Publish your Spotify profile to the web: easily publish the link to your Spotify profile on your blog, Facebook page, website or anywhere else on the web and allow others to follow your musical journey. For example here’s a link to the official Spotify profile.

Inbox: a new ‘inbox’ folder on Spotify’s left sidebar lets you send tracks to friends directly within the platform, simply by dragging and dropping a track to their name in the People sidebar. Alternatively, just right click on the track and select the new ‘send to’ option.

Facebook feed: music your friends have posted on Facebook will be visible on the Spotify ‘What’s new’ page and via a new ‘Feed’ tab.

Popularity count for playlists: all playlists will show how many other Spotify users are currently subscribed to that playlist. By clicking on the number, you can even see the usernames of those who added the playlist.

Track playlist changes: see who and when a track was added to a playlist with the new ‘Added’ and ‘User’ columns in playlists.

Library

Local files: missing any music in Spotify? Now you can import a link to all the music files stored on your computer with a simple click of a button.

Local file linking: we will check your local files and see if we have that track/artist/album in Spotify. If we do, we’ll make the file linkable so you can easily go from that file into an artist or album page. This allows for better sharing of playlists that contain a mix of your own music and Spotify’s.

Starred: every track and album on Spotify can now be ‘starred’ – allowing you to tag all your favourites into a special sub-folder.

Wireless sync: you can copy your music files to your mobile without connecting a USB cable with our new wireless sync feature.

Filter bar: the library has a permanent filter-bar at the top so you can easily type in what you’re searching for. In all other lists the filter bar is visible when pressing cmd-f (mac) or ctrl-f (windows).

Additional features

Mosaic images for playlists: the artwork from the first nine tracks in a playlist will create a cool mosaic image for your playlist

New toolbar in headers: Sharing music to Facebook/Twitter and your friends is much simpler. Easy to subscribe or unsubscribe to a playlist as well as view information about how popular a playlist is.

A share icon in ‘Now playing’ artwork: makes sharing what you’re currently listening to much easier.

Automatic track replacement: Spotify will now automatically try to find a replacement for any track you can’t play. So if a friend in another country sends you a playlist with tracks you can’t play or a local file, we’ll search our catalogue and link to a playable track when possible. A ‘link’ icon next to the track name represents replaced tracks.

So how do you get the new version? We’ve started rolling out the update to users today, however, it will take us a number of days to get it to everyone. Once we’re ready to update your account it will happen automatically upon restart so you won’t need to do anything.

We’ve been working long and hard on this for the past few months and we really hope you enjoy it!